Simple and high-performance electrical storage with two-dimensional polymers

Northwestern and Cornell University researchers have designed and evaluated a new phenazine-based 2D covalent electronic framework, which form the basis of devices that store electricity and are easy to manufacture. Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a new class of polymer with ordered, two-dimensional structures that are promising materials for energy storage devices. They can organize building blocks capable of accepting or giving up electrons into structures that maximize their performance. However, COFs have previously needed to be prepared as extremely thin films or with conductive additives to show good performance. This breakthrough eliminated these requirements, demonstrating COF-based supercapacitors that showed superior performance and scalable fabrication techniques compared to previous reports.

The Northwestern team was led by Northwestern Chemistry Professor William Dicthel, the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern. The first study author is Dr. Edon Vitaku, who is now a Senior Scientist at CycloPure, Inc., a startup company co-founded by Dichtel that is developing water purification technologies. Read the full study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.